This 'novel' idea just doesn't work

The Reader (R) The Weinstein Company (123 min.)
Directed by Stephen Daldry. With Kate Winslet, David Kross, Ralph Fiennes. Now playing at theaters in New York. TWO STARS

Occasionally, meaning to say something nice, people will write of a film that it "feels like a novel." It's meant to be a compliment, but it's not -- because it often comes from people who actually look down on movies, and think they have to be like something else to be any good.

A movie shouldn't "feel like a novel" any more than it should feel like a song, sketch or interpretive dance. It simply should feel like a movie -- a mix of all those arts and yet still, stubbornly, its own.

"The Reader," unfortunately, is just the sort of film that gets that kind of faint praise -- not because it's rich in characters (the way the "novelistic" films of Altman and Sayles are) but because it doesn't build up much of a head of steam as a picture. Characters fail to connect. Scenes switch about confusingly.

Based (of course) on a novel, "The Reader" is the story of a post-war German teenager -- 15 and bookish in 1958. Then he meets a mysterious, 30-something woman who takes an interest in him. She also takes him into her bed where, in between her educational lovemaking, he reads to her from the Great Classics.

It feels like a joke -- as in "The Graduate," when Benjamin wanted to have deep conversations and Mrs. Robinson just wanted to get to it -- but, unfortunately "The Reader" takes all this very seriously, if not pretentiously, mixing Homer with fun in the tub. It's all so arty and Continental, you see -- not crude pornography but classy Eurotica.

But then the woman suddenly dumps the boy, and disappears. And then we flash forward eight years to when the teen, now grown, is a law student attending a war-crimes trial -- and discovering, to his horror, than his lover is now a defendant, answering for her behavior as a death-camp guard 20 years ago.

It all feels contrived and crass, from its facile use of the Holocaust to the sexual abuse -- here mislabeled a "love affair" -- of a 15-year-old boy by a grown woman, whose exploitation the filmmakers merely continue. Because why is it necessary that the boy sleeps in the nude? Or that, while swimming in a lake, the woman suddenly stands up to reveal her breasts?

The cast is a bit hit-and-miss. The infallible Kate Winslet is marvelous as Hannah, the seducer with the S.S. past (a performance at its best, and most physical, when she's an old woman later on). And Ralph Fiennes, that poet of the unexpressed, is marvelous as her boy-toy grown old (just hearing him read "The Odyssey" is a treat).

Unfortunately, David Kross, who plays the teenager, is relatively charmless, unable to convey any emotion beyond awkward embarrassment. And that's a critical failing, because when, late in the film he betrays Hannah, there's absolutely no inkling of why he's abandoning her, or what this behavior will mean later.

A better director might find a way to make that clearer. But then Stephen Daldry, working here from a script by playwright David Hare, isn't really a filmmaker -- he's a theater director who had an undeserved hit with the corny "Billy Elliot," and then segued into the bookish distractions of "The Hours." He is the literary type.

But movies are not literature, and his refusal to acknowledge that is where "The Reader" fails.